This invention relates generally to storage of media data files, and more particularly to the storage and management of image and video media data files in enterprise storage environments.
Many enterprises generate large numbers of video and image media data files. These may be medical, CT, MRI media or simply other types of videos and image media data. Such media data files may be subject to certain retention requirements established by regulatory regimes or other policies. For example, it may be necessary to retain some types of media data for a number of years, while other types of media data may have much shorter retention periods. Frequently, the enterprise system simply backs up such media data files in its data protection storage system in the same way as other data without regard to the type or content of the media data files and without treating the media data within the files as being special. Media data files such as image and video files consume significant amounts of data, and, accordingly, require significant amounts of storage capacity. Regular data files can be transformed and/or compressed with little or no loss in the accuracy of the data. Additionally, regular data files may be de-duplicated to eliminate duplicate copies of the same files to reduce storage requirements. Media data files, however, are typically not compressible, and de-duplication is possible only if the files are identical, which is generally not the case with media data files. Moreover, backup systems retain data in a lossless format. However, the significance of the content of the image and video media data and the need for timely access to the data content may diminish over time, making it unnecessary and inefficient to backup and store media data files in the same lossless way as general data. Thus, storing media data files in general purpose de-duplicated protection storage is not beneficial, and can be wasteful of resources and expensive.
Application awareness in data protection is a major part of the protection approaches today, but the focus is typically about integrating with the applications to obtain consistent point in time images for applications such as databases. Application point time images are usually managed by the backup software and allow the backup administrator to configure retention periods for each application image. However, the time value and the significance of the content of image and video media data may be difficult to predict, making it impractical to set either arbitrary or standardized retention periods for backup and storage of media data files. Today, there are no enterprise level management systems which permit managing image and video media files based upon their content in an efficient, compliant and automated manner.
It is desirable to provide systems and methods for the automatic management and backup of image and video media data that address the foregoing and other known problems of data protection for such media data, and it is to these ends that the present invention is directed.